In a major change, the American Heart Association said Monday that hands-only CPR — rapid, deep presses on the victim’s chest until help arrives — works just as well as standard CPR for sudden cardiac arrest in adults.

Experts hope bystanders will now be more willing to jump in and help if they see someone suddenly collapse. Hands-only CPR is simpler and easier to remember and removes a big barrier for people skittish about the mouth-to-mouth breathing.

“You only have to do two things. Call 911 and push hard and fast on the middle of the person’s chest,” said Dr. Michael Sayre, an emergency medicine professor at Ohio State University who headed the committee that made the recommendation.

Hands-only CPR calls for uninterrupted chest presses — 100 a minute — until paramedics take over or an automated external defibrillator is available to restore a normal heart rhythm.

The imbalance in the supply and demand for physicians will continue to intensify as the U.S. population continues to grow faster than the physician workforce. Added pressure will come with the increasing number of physicians practicing medicine on a part-time basis, as reported the 2007 Retention Survey from the American Medical Group Association (AMGA) and Cejka Search, a nationally recognized physician and healthcare executive search organization.

In the recently released AMGA/Cejka Search survey, responding groups reported an increase in the percentage of physicians practicing part-time from 13 percent in 2005 to 19 percent in 2007.

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer proposed a new loan-forgiveness program that would entice new doctors to rural communities like Cobleskill, and his newly sworn-in successor, Gov. David Paterson, has expressed support for the initiative.

More than one-quarter of New Yorkers live in areas designated “underserved,” which is classified as more than 3,500 people per primary-care doctor, according to the state Department of Health. The Mohawk Valley, the Finger Lakes and the North Country are among the regions struggling to attract doctors. The Health Department estimates more than 300 primary-care physicians are needed to alleviate the shortage. Speciality doctors are hard to find, too.

Avera Health, Sioux Falls, S.D., announced it has formed Avera Medical Group, a network of 325 physicians and 187 health professionals in communities across Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and the Dakotas. The 75 practices in the medical group will share branding, business operations, managed-care contracting, recruitment and retention, coding and reimbursement, information technology, property insurance and other services.

“Avera is very sensitive to the fact that each physician and practice is unique,” David Flicek, senior vice president of Avera Medical Group, said in a news release. “Avera Medical Group brings us together around a shared infrastructure, standards and brand identity, and gets us all on the same page for such vital initiatives as the electronic medical record.”

Sponsored by the Sisters of St. Benedict of Sacred Heart Monastery of Yankton, S.D., and the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Aberdeen, S.D., Avera is a regional partnership of health professionals who share support services at more than 231 locations in eastern South Dakota and the surrounding states

The ambulances come screaming down city streets, rushing on calls to burst boils, clip hangnails and check on smelly body parts. At the cost of $700 a visit.

Meanwhile, the District’s ambulances are unavailable to help in real 911 emergencies, a problem the city’s Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department is trying to fix with a new program it rolled out this week called Street Calls.

Thirty people accounted for 2,400 emergency transports last year, said Michael D. Williams, the department’s chief medical officer. That’s a good chunk of the 78,000 ambulance trips his teams made in that same period, he said.

The program to try to change the lopsided statistic was announced by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) in his State of the District speech this month and was introduced this week.

Medical workers will get into vans and visit the top 20 offenders who habitually call 911 in instances of “misuse” and try to work with them to gently curb the inappropriate calls that send ambulances racing around town, department spokesman Alan Etter said.

Many hospital patients are dissatisfied with some aspects of their care and might not recommend their hospitals to friends and relatives, the federal government said Friday as it issued ratings for most of the nation’s hospitals, based on the first uniform national survey of patients.

The survey was meant to provide a constructive way for patients to complain about arrogant doctors, crabby nurses and dirty or noisy hospital rooms. Medical experts said that some of the complaints bore directly on the quality of care.

Many patients reported that they had not been treated with courtesy and respect by doctors and nurses; that they had not received adequate pain medication after surgery; and that they did not understand the instructions they received when discharged from the hospital.

Nationwide, in the average hospital, 67 percent of patients said they would definitely recommend the institution where they had been treated to friends and relatives. Sixty-three percent gave their hospitals a score of 9 or 10 on a scale of 0 to 10.

Quick: Which of your local hospitals treats patients best? And how does it compare with facilities in the next town?

You’d have been out of luck getting much of an answer in most parts of the country until now. But this afternoon, Mike Leavitt, secretary of Health and Human Services, unveiled the addition of patient satisfaction data to Medicare’s three-year-old Hospital Compare Web site. The changes are part of a continuing effort by HHS to improve the measurement of health quality and, in the process, to spur better care.

“We’re not very good at this, but we’re making a lot of progress,” Leavitt conceded to a room packed with reporters and editors attending the annual meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists outside Washington. In a video game analogy, Leavitt added, “We are just leaving the Pong era when it comes to measuring quality.”

The 10 new data points– including how clean and quiet patients found the joint, whether medical staff listened and communicated well, and how well the facility treated patients’ pain — join some 26 quality measures already on the site. HHS is also moving some data on Medicare’s cost to treat a number of conditions, and the volume of procedures done, here from elsewhere on its site. All of it will be hospital-specific, with local, state and national comparisons.

COLUMBUS, Ga. – A retired teacher bearing a grudge over his mother’s treatment at the hospital where she died fatally shot one of her nurses, another employee and a man outside Thursday before police shot him, authorities said.

Charles Johnston, 63, is being charged with murder and will be turned over to police after an overnight stay in another hospital, where he was treated for a shoulder wound, Police Chief Ricky Boren said.

The chief said the gunman arrived at Doctors Hospital with three pistols, including a 9mm automatic and a .38-caliber revolver, and went to the fifth-floor intensive care unit where his mother had been in 2004.